On the Road vol. 1 The Bus to New York.

Veteran's Day weekend, I took my second annual Birthday visit trip to New York City to see Matt Franks on his birthday (if you all lived on the East Coast, you could bet I'd be on your doorstep with a batch of brownies and a big hug on all those October birthdays, too). After what happened last year (a few hours of sleep in piles of silly string, crushed potato chips, and other puddles of foul, sticky spoo), I decided it would be wise to bring a sleeping bag, despite my new mantra of packing as light as possible. This would also be my first trip to Princeton New Jersey to see, for the first time, my brother's band play a show. Friday morning, toothbrush, shower shoes, PJs, towel, change of shirt socks underwear, sleeping bag and 500-page biography of Willem de Kooning in bag, I made my way to gate 3 at South Station around 1 p.m., despite my long history of early morning departures.

Bus trips (and plane and train trips) have always been a very romantic idea to me. The trip, from the gate to the destination, feels like a complete dramatic episode, one with an exposition, a conflict, a climax, and the sort of abrupt and inevitable resolution that leaves one a little nostalgic and a little relieved. It's the people being held in an intimate, anonymous, and palpable (by the end) tension for the entirety of the 5-hour journey that really do it. You wait around with people who may be coming from somewhere different and may be going somewhere different, but for the timebeing will be just like you, on the Peter Pan schedule 1886 to New York City, Port Authority.

At the gate, the signs, big and friendly like the ones in the San Diego airport, and the tile and the stainless steel framed a bustling scene of Veterans Day travel. The wait for New York City is the longest, and I find myself in the company of a rich girl who's wrapped in the spandex and leather boots of the season, fiddling with her iPod and sipping at her coke; a clean cut white kid in a striped polo who is highlighting a coursepack in between checking the clock; a couple arguing in Canadian French over how the schedules work and when they need to be where and whether or not they need IDs; a mother-daughter pair of overweight midwestern tourists doing the same in English; a girl in a BU sweatshirt, a guy in a Tufts sweatshirt, a guy in a UMich sweatshirt, a girl with matching Vera Bradley quilted paisley totes, a girl in a Williams sweatshirt; an older black gentleman in a Red Sox cap and quiet. There is almost a sense of antagonism in the air, although none of us are really going to have to passive-aggressively fight each other for a seat (that happens later, on the ride home from New York at the end of the weekend). Everyone sneaks peeks at each other as though wondering who will have the balls to try and sit next to them when it comes time to settle in on the bus, and when it's perfectly clear that they're happy sitting alone with their music and their head against the window.

Of course, nobody sits alone on a bus to New York. So, slowly, and with adorable, hesitant steps (or not-so-adorable, forceful motions) everyone fills in the seats next to each other. A small woman with dyed red-black hair who speaks as though her mouth is full says, "Man, full bus, huh," and sits down next to me. She barely fills the seat. She is pale but has shadows in her face and under her eyes. We don't talk and both fall asleep. When I wake up two hours later, she is even crumpled even smaller, with her pale face hidden in her oily red-black hair and blacker coat, looking like a wet bird buried in sleep, or cold. Everyone is sleeping or pretending to, and so I look out the window and drift off.

Eventually, about 3 hours into the 5 hour ride, people are awake, talking on cell phones (loudly, about picking classes or being really wasted the night before or about who played whom where and who won), or reading coursepacks. I guess I don't really know what the non-college kids were doing because they aren't so vocal. Or so brightly colored. We stop at a Roy Rogers, and my bus-mate comes back with a burger meal. We start to talk. She's from Maine, living with a man she met on the Internet. It was love at first email, she jokes, and laughs, and wheezes. She's commuting home to New Jersey by bus this time, because her husband's mom is sick. It's cold up there, and it's cold on this bus, she says. She asks if I'm going home, and I say no, that I'm going to New York City, but I'm from San Diego. She doesn't hear me and asks if I'm going to see my folks at the station. We have trouble understanding each other; I think I speak too quietly, and she speaks as though her teeth are getting in the way, but really she is just slurring her words.

Just outside New York City, we start to hit traffic, and here, as it would in a movie, little things begin to pile up and stick on our nerves--people try to call their parents, friends, and family telling them that we'll be late; my busmate falls asleep and drops her Coke on the ground, and apologizes profusely, saying that she's just so tired, and I tell her that I know, and I get paper towels from the bathroom and clean it up for her while she frets and attempts to soak it up with a stationary envelope from her backpack, the black, bespectacled woman a row behind us wakes up the college girl the row in front of us to tell her to move her bag before it gets wet, the college kid with the coursepack to our left looks over wondering if he should help, wondering if I'm annoyed.

And then she gets on the phone to call Steve. Steve, I gather, is her brother. And for the next hour, as the traffic thickens, and the sky darkens, and the red and orange and yellow lights of cars and street signs and New York City life fill the windows, the conversation that fills the bus at terrifying intervals goes something like this:

Steve, it's me.
No, listen to me. No. I tell ya, I ain't on anything. I fell asleep on the bus. I've been on the bus, I'm so fuckin tired and I'm sick of this.
No, I ain't. I told you, I ain't.
Have you talked to her yet? She's supposed to talk to
That evil bitch of a woman what's she been sayin'
I told you. I ain't. I ain't. I just got out today, and I got the bloodwork and everything. I am so fuckin tired, physically, mentally
I told you. I'll tell you what, Steve, after this I ain't talkin to nobody in the family. Ever.
Please, Steve. Just do this for me. Talk to her. Talk to Aunt Fina. What'm I supposed to do?
So what're you gonna do? Just leave me in Newark?
Yeah I wish Aunt Fina was on my side, she's supposed to be on my side. She'll have the cops out there. Just call her. Steve, just call her.
I got out today. I ain't on anything. I'm just tired. And you want me out there with the fuckin bronchitis, I can't believe this.
So what, the kids are gonna be fucked up because I'm sleeping in one goddamn room in the house? She'll have the cops there. She's supposed to talk to my mother.
I can't yell. I'm on the fucking bus and everyone's gonna be lookin at me like I'm a fucking insane person.
Look, I'm tired. Just call her. Steve, just call her for me.

And by the end of it, at 8 p.m. as we inched our way toward 42nd street, she stared out the window, defeated. And I was small in my seat, trying not to be there, and trying to avoid the stares in our direction, the black woman over her spectacles, the kid out of the corner of his eye, everyone else, from the backs of their heads and behind my head. And before the bus unloads with steamy haste into Port Authority, before most of us are swept up into the arms and legs and coats and bags and hats of New York she says "Man, it's a long ride, isn't it?"